A five-year-old girl waits with her mother to board a bus to Poland from Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine. “Children’s lives are still consumed by thoughts of survival and not childhood,” UNICEF warned.
This article is published in association with United Nations.
Families across Ukraine are in “constant survival mode” amid ongoing waves of Russian missile and drone strikes that have left blocks without power for days at a time, while temperatures plunge to deadly lows, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.
“Families have actually reverted to stuffing even soft toys to their windows to block some of the freezing cold,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF Country Representative in Ukraine.
The alert follows another night of reported attacks against power infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia oblast in the south and Kharkiv oblast in the east which have left many residential areas without electricity and heating.
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The deadly threat of cold caused by attacks on energy networks is becoming a “national-scale emergency…on top of the war”, Mr. Mammadzade told journalists in Geneva during a scheduled briefing.
Pointing to temperatures of -15°C (5°F) in Kyiv on Friday, the UNICEF official warned that next week could be even colder, while millions of families across the country live without heating. “Children and families are in constant survival mode because of that,” he said.
Aid shift
While the humanitarian focus until now has been on frontline areas, the constant Russian strikes on urban infrastructure including residential areas have highlighted a far more complicated set of needs among people living in apartment blocks.
These include Kyiv resident Svitlana “who is doing what she can to care for her three-year-old daughter, Adina”, on the 10th floor of her building. “She told us that she had no heating or electricity for more than three days, and that was in the first week of disruption – we’re already on the second or almost third week – and many families continue to go without,” Mr. Mammadzade said.
Echoing those concerns from Kyiv, Jaime Wah from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) noted that although power has been restored “in a matter of days” following previous attacks on Kharkiv and Odesa, the situation appeared more difficult in the capital, where she rubbed her hands to keep warm while talking via video to journalists in Geneva. “In Kyiv, we’re facing a situation for sustained outages and also higher populations affected because of it,” she said.
Nearly four years since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, “children’s lives are still consumed by thoughts of survival and not childhood”, UNICEF’s Mr. Mammadzade warned, noting an 11 per cent increase in verified child casualties during 2025, compared to the previous year.
The agency helps vulnerable people in Ukrainian cities by supporting large communal tents where they can get warm and find games and toys to play with.
© UNICEF/Oleksii Fili
Families seek warmth and support inside a mobile tent during a winter power outage in Kyiv, Ukraine.
“Svitlana can’t bathe Arina or prepare hot food, so she wraps her child in multiple layers and navigates 10 floors of the dark stairwell to reach a tent set up outside by Ukraine’s State Emergency Services,” explained Mr. Mammadzade. “There, they can warm up, get hot food, charge devices and speak with a psychologist – or simply sit in the warmth.”
The UN Children’s Fund warns that children are especially vulnerable to the physical and mental impact of living in the dark and coping with freezing temperatures which it says can intensify fear and stress “and can lead to, or exacerbate respiratory and other health conditions”.
“The youngest are the most vulnerable,” Mr. Mammadzade explained. “Newborns and infants lose body heat rapidly and are at heightened risk of hypothermia and respiratory illness, conditions that can quickly become life-threatening without adequate warmth and medical care.”
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